abolitionists as the main source of information; from them the gaps in the real history of the Underground Railroad must be filled, if filled at all. [21] Conversation with Robert Purvis, Philadelphia, Pa., December 24, 1895. [22] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, pp. 56, 57. [23] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, pp. 120, 121. It is with the aid of such memorials that the present volume has been written. Reminiscences have been gathered by correspondence and by travel from many surviving abolitionists or their families; and recollections of fugitive slave days have been culled from books, newspapers, letters and diaries. During three years of the five years of preparation the author's residence in Ohio afforded him opportunity to visit many places in that state where former employees of the Underground Railroad could be found, and to extend these explorations to southern Michigan, and among the surviving fugitives along the Detroit River in the Province of Ontario. Residence in Massachusetts during the years 1895-1897 has enabled him to secure some interesting information in regard to underground lines in New England. The materials thus collected relate to the following states: Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont, besides a few items concerning North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware. Underground operations practically ceased with the beginning of the Civil War. In view of the lapse of time, the reasons for trusting the credibility of the evidence upon which our knowledge of the Underground Road rests should be stated. Some of the testimony dealt with in this chapter was put in writing during the period of the Road's operation, or at the close of its activity, and, therefore, cannot be easily questioned. But it may be said that a large part of the materials for this history were drawn from written and oral accounts obtained at a much later date; and that these materials, even though the honesty and fidelity of the narrators be granted, are worthy of little credit for historical purposes. Such a criticism would doubtless be just as applied to reminiscences purporting to represent particular events with great detail of narration, but clearly it would lose much of its force when directed against recollections of occurrences that came within the range of the narrator's experience, not once nor twice, but many times with little variation in their main features. It would be difficult to imagine an "old-time" abolitionist, whose faculties are in a fair state of preservation, forgetting that he received fugitives from a certain neighbor or community a few miles away, that he usually stowed them in his garret or his haymow, and that he was in the habit of taking them at night in all kinds of weather to one of several different stations, the managers of which he knew intimately and trusted implicitly.